This is me, the writer, telling stories about family, travel, quirky moments in life and refecting on the world and its absurdities.

Saturday, 25 July 2015

For the Linguaphiles - Cape'in / Capelin / Capeƚin

At the family reunion in Italy we were being told that our name was pronounced
Capelin (three syllables with equal emphasis all three syllables) and/or
Cape'in. The locals insisted in pronouncing it in two ways one of which dropped
the L which was very confusing. Well now I understand.
Cape'in is the
Venetian pronunciation.

I've been searching for some Venetian vocab to use
in my
book and yesterday came across a site devoted to the Venetian Language
-
alphabet, pronunciation, dictionary etc all in English.

I had found
a word that I wanted to use but it had this strange symbol in it ("ƚ" ) - so I
was searching to find out how it would be pronounced and ..........

There
are two versions of L in Venetian. One is the standard L of English and the
other ("ƚ" ) with a line through it, has a sound which is described as between L
and E (see below). So the Venetian spelling of our name would have been Capeƚin,
the "ƚ" pronounced like a very breathy (aspirated) "hey" or perhaps an aspirated
"ee" - Cape'in. Here's an exerpt from the Venetian alphabet and pronunciation
website:

l

same as English, "l" as in "lean",
"lamb"

ƚ

typical Venet, semi-vowel, pronounced between a full L
and an E (without the tongue touching the
palate)

Also in Venetian the "a" is pronounced as the
"u" in "gut" so phonetically possibly Cup/hey/in or Cup/el/in rather than
Cap/hey/in or Cap/el/in

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